By Carol Khorramchahi
Boston University News Service
The U.S. Supreme Court did not overturn a single marriage when it declined this fall to take up Kim Davis’s appeal. However, in Massachusetts, the place where this fight first cracked open, the moment was a reminder that even the most lived-in rights can still feel conditional.
In November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage violated the state constitution. The Court’s 4–3 decision made Massachusetts the first state in the country where same-sex couples had the right to marry under state law, as outlined by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders and the Court’s own opinion.
The ruling took effect on May 17, 2004, when city and town clerks across the Commonwealth began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. WBUR reported on the 20th anniversary that based on state data, “well over 30,000” LGBTQ+ couples have gotten married in Massachusetts since that day.
That local history has reshaped the state’s demographics. U.S. census data summarized by WBSM in 2023 show that Massachusetts had 20,940 married same-sex couple households in 2020, and that the state’s share of same-sex couple households is higher than the national average. A separate analysis from USAFacts, drawing on national census figures, found that households headed by same-sex couples grew from about 335,000 in 2014 to roughly 775,000 in 2023, a 131% increase.
In other words, by the time the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Massachusetts couples had already spent 11 years building lives, mortgages, parenthood and immigration status — around marriages their own constitution promised to respect.
When the court quietly refused Kim Davis’s invitation to revisit Obergefell this November, many Massachusetts families heard something that did not quite sound like closure.
Lives built on precedent
The justices who declined Davis’s petition have not all been friendly to LGBTQ+ claims, but some have been explicit about why marriage equality, once recognized, sits in a different category than some other culture-war issues.
In a 2020 opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch discussed “reliance interests,” the idea that courts should weigh how deeply people have organized their lives around a rule before tossing it aside. He offered entering into a marriage as a classic example, alongside signing contracts or buying a home.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her own public writing and in recent interviews about her book “Listening to the Law,” has grouped the right to marry, to engage in consensual sexual intimacy and to use contraception together as fundamental liberties the court has recognized, distinguishing them from abortion, which she describes as involving different constitutional considerations.
Those legal concepts aren’t abstract in Massachusetts. WBUR’s 2024 anniversary coverage emphasized that couples here have already lived through an entire arc: from the shock of Goodridge, to the routine of everyday married life, to a renewed anxiety after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called for reconsidering Obergefell in his concurrence.
When Mary Bonauto, the Boston-based civil rights attorney who argued Obergefell and served as co-counsel in Goodridge, reacted to the court’s denial in the Davis case, she framed it in those terms: a decision that allows millions of families to breathe easier because equality on paper has become equality in practice. Her comments, reported by the New York Times and GLAD, stressed that “every family deserves equal protection under the law,” even as advocates warned against complacency.
The numbers: broad support, sharper divides
Public opinion is another reason the court may hesitate to reopen marriage, and another source of unease.
A 2024 Gallup “Values and Beliefs” poll found that 69% of Americans support legal same-sex marriage, close to the record highs of 71% in 2022 and 2023. But inside that top-line number, the ground is less stable. A 2025 Gallup analysis, summarized by Gallup and The Economist, reported that only 41% of Republicans now support legal recognition of same-sex marriages, compared with 88% of Democrats, the widest partisan gap Gallup has recorded in nearly three decades of tracking the issue. Massachusetts looks very different. A 2024 report from the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas estimated that 81% of Massachusetts residents support allowing same-sex couples to marry legally. An updated PRRI analysis released in 2025 put Massachusetts at the top of the national list at 87% support, the highest in the country.
The pattern is clear.n the state that first legalized marriage equality, the question is largely settled. Nationally, the right is popular but increasingly polarized, a tempting target for activists looking for leverage and a risky one for a Supreme Court that has already burned significant institutional capital on other culture-war rulings.
What protects marriages right now
On the ground, same-sex marriages in Massachusetts are propped up by three overlapping layers of law.
First, there is Goodridge itself. As GLAD notes in its case summary, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held in 2003 that the state constitution requires the Commonwealth to recognize marriages of same-sex couples on the same terms as different-sex couples. That holding does not depend on federal law.
Second, there is Obergefell, which requires every state to license same-sex marriages and recognize marriages performed elsewhere as a matter of federal constitutional law.
Third, there is the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022. According to the official bill summary on Congress.gov and nonpartisan explainers from groups like Whitman-Walker Health, the law repeals the old Defense of Marriage Act and requires both the federal government and every state to recognize valid same-sex and interracial marriages performed in any state, regardless of each state’s own marriage laws.That statutory protection has limits. If a future court ever overturned Obergefell, individual states could, in theory, stop issuing new marriage licenses to same-sex couples. But couples who marry in states that retain marriage equality, including Massachusetts, would still have their marriages recognized nationwide under federal law.
Vigilance without panic
National LGBTQ+ groups responded to the court’s move in the Davis case with a kind of disciplined calm: grateful for the outcome, clear-eyed about the landscape.
Lambda Legal, in its statement, called Davis’s petition an obvious long shot, “no surprise” to see rejected, but warned that opponents of marriage equality are “well resourced” and will keep hunting for more sympathetic plaintiffs and more strategic cases.
The Human Rights Campaign described the order as a “reaffirmation” that marriage equality is settled, even as it pointed to other recent Supreme Court decisions upholding state bans on gender-affirming care for minors as evidence that broader LGBTQ+ rights remain under pressure. Closer to home, WBUR’s anniversary coverage last spring captured a similar mix of stability and unease. Couples who married on that first day in May 2004 now talk about teenagers, mortgages and naturalization paperwork, and about the quiet fear that a change on the court could make something as fundamental as a spouse’s green card suddenly feel contingent.
That is the paradox Massachusetts – the state that first opened the door to marriage equality and has some of the strongest legal and cultural protections in the country – lives with now. The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Kim Davis’s challenge is not the ending to the story of marriage equality. It is a reminder that vigilance may be the price of keeping these marriages not just legal, but secure.
